the where of it

what does it sound like, there?

• Posted by Summer Wood on April 6th, 2009 filed in craft of writing, music
• 2 Comments »

Not long ago I needed to use some linseed oil for a project.  I bought a pint, opened the tin container, and … Voila!  My father emerged!

Well, not his person, actually.  But the first whiff of that rich, amber oil brought to mind a memory of him so vivid I had to glance around to make sure he wasn’t there.  He himself smells of corduroy and musk, but the linseed oil triggered a sensory flood:  childhood, replayed.  My dad glazing the gazillion tiny windowpanes of the greenhouse he built.  My father mixing the oil with turpentine to spread on the outdoor furniture.  Linseed oil smells like summertime, like lazy afternoons, projects that won’t ever be finished.  There’s something old-fashioned and comforting to me about its thick and pungent scent.

The senses can do that to you.  Smell might be most intimately linked to memory – scientists venture that it is – but they all serve to bring us into closer contact with the world.  It risks the obvious to say that sensory details are indispensable to good writing about place.  They don’t have to be exhaustive, laying out every last facet; but combining the seen, which comes easily to most writers, with the heard or the smelled or the felt or the tasted can bring the reader closer to the shared experience.

When I travel, I find I’m acutely tuned to ambient noise.  Teenagers talking smack in the subway, crossing from Manhattan to the Bronx.  The rattle and hum of the narrow-gauge train as it chugs up the steep climb from Chihuahua to Creel.  The blending voices of women singing as they wash clothes in the river below the monastery in Tibet.  Dogs barking at 4 a.m. in the 17^th arrondissement.  (Yes, of course they bark in French!)  Because these sounds lie outside the realm of my everyday experience, I pay closer attention.  And when I reflect back, more often than not it’s the aural memories that spur the visual ones for me, and not the other way around.

Plenty of composers work with ambient or “found” sound in their music.  It’s not uncommon for modern pieces to incorporate recorded sounds from the environment, modulating and adapting them to the demands of the musical structure.  I went to an unforgettable Meredith Monk solo concert some years ago, and for days after I could identify people on the street who’d been to the same show.  All of us were subconsciously mimicking the clicks and buzzes and whirrs of insect voices Monk had adapted from the local landscape for her work.

The composer John Luther Adams, in his piece “The Place Where You Go to Listen,” turns the equation on its head.  He structures the music entirely on real-time input from the environment.  I heard about Adams in a profile Alex Ross wrote for the New Yorker.  Here’s what Ross says about the composition:

At the Museum of the North, on the grounds of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, the composer John Luther Adams has created a sound-and-light installation called “The Place Where You Go to Listen” – a kind of infinite musical work that is controlled by natural events occurring in real time.  The title refers to Naalagiaguik, a place on the coast of the Arctic Ocean where, according to legend, a spiritually attuned Inupiaq woman went to hear the voices of birds, whales, and unseen things around her.  In keeping with that magical idea, the mechanism of “The Place” translates raw data into music:  information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into an intricate, vibrantly colored field of electronic sound.

I can’t think of an analogous way the sounds and impulses of the environment are incorporated into written work – except, maybe, in the diction and cadences of the narrative voice.  More mediated, for sure; but no less physical.

Anybody been to Fairbanks to listen to Adams’s installment?